


Oblivion and Elsewhere

by Rowana77



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 05:26:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3598035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rowana77/pseuds/Rowana77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-"Avengers: Age of Ultron," a guilt- and angst-ridden Tony Stark is in a very bad place emotionally.  He's left Avengers Tower - and only one of his teammates knows where to find him and what to do when she does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oblivion and Elsewhere

“Tony,” said Natasha, reaching for his arm. “I have something that may help.” 

He looked at her, eyes large and dark in the gathering gloom. 

She took a breath. “Part of what I carry with me – what everyone who works…in the field…carries – is a stash of…things to help me sleep. And things to help me stay awake. On the nights that stretch into days and days, the times I need to stay awake 48 hours or more, the nights I need to sleep, when…” She paused. “When the madness has just been too much, and I can’t.” 

She felt him recoil slightly, felt his muscles stiffen. “You carry…drugs with you?” 

_Oh, my sweet genius naïf_ , she thought. 

“Yes,” she said gently. “Nothing dangerous. Just enough to take the edge off, get rid of the demons, relax you and let you sleep. We only use it when we’re working with a partner – so one can sleep while the other watches…” 

She saw him smile bitterly in the deepening blue shadows. 

“So…that’s it, I guess. They sent you to kill me? A nice quiet needle in the dark, untraceable? And then the worst bad guy of them all, the one who created all this death and agony…just dies of a heart attack.” He laughed coldly. “He had a weak heart anyway; the world will be a better place without him.” 

She stared at him. He shifted and looked at her sadly. “I can’t…fight you, Nat. If that’s what you’re here for, then do it. I deserve it. I don’t care any more.” He sighed and closed his eyes, waiting. “Do it. Get it over with.” 

She’d expected this, but it still hurt her on a far deeper and more visceral level than she’d have ever thought it would. 

“Goddamn it, Tony, no. That’s not it! For God’s sake, I’ve fought beside you in how many battles, backed you up, took your idiotic guff and gave it back to you. I fucking deserve better than that from you. I came here to help you, you motherfucking dimwit. Let me in. Let me help you.” 

He had opened his eyes again and was looking at her as if she were his last hope, his last fear. 

She said, softer now, “Not everyone is your enemy, Tony. Please, just trust me.” 

“Like…the world trusted me?”

“Tony. You didn’t intend for any of this to happen. You wanted to protect the world. I know this. Everyone knows it.” 

“Doesn’t change the outcome, Nat. Thousands of people are dead, maimed, because of what I did. What I created. Ultron was my creation. No one else – just me. I did it. Oh, God…all those kids…why…why am I still alive and they’re not??”  
His entire body shook again; his breathing quickened into gasps like sobs, and he turned away from her, covering his eyes with one hand, rocking back and forth slightly. 

_This is trauma, PTSD_ , she thought. _I’ve seen this before. Hell, I’ve BEEN through this before._

She realized suddenly that Tony was truly all alone – all his friends and fallbacks were gone. Without Pepper, without Bruce, without Jarvis, of course; without Rhodey; without any of the other Avengers – he’d come here, to this cold, lonely apartment, to…what? Grieve by himself? 

Do something to himself? 

She took a deep breath. 

“Tony. Please let me help you. Then I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else. Not even Clint.” 

She reached for his arm – and he didn’t flinch or pull away. “Let me help you. Do you trust me, Tony? After all we’ve been through…together?” 

He looked up and met her eyes. “I trust you like I’ve always trusted you, Nat.” 

She steeled herself, waiting for the blow. 

“With my life,” he said simply. 

Something warm suffused her. Damn this man I can never predict. I have the others figured out; but this one, not in a million years. 

Their gaze held as she took his hand and rummaged at her belt for her little pharmacopeia. 

“I promise you, this will help you, Tony. You’re exhausted; you need to sleep, but your brain won’t let you sleep. It’s playing a tape of everything that’s happened, over and over, and you can’t make it stop.”

He was leaning slightly against her now; she felt him nod, felt the shaking of his body as he tried to control himself. 

I’ve been here, she thought. So often. Just like this. Exactly like this. Why do we do what we do? And yet, if we didn’t do it, who else would? 

She plunged the needle into the little vial, withdrew the dose. His arm was pliant as she found the vein and gently released a good ten hours of sweet deliverance into his bloodstream. He winced a little, and then pulled back in alarm as the first wave of the drug’s effect hit him. His hand flew to his neck, and he gasped and twisted in her grasp. 

“No…Tony, don’t fight it. Don’t fight it. It will seem strange for a few minutes, but it’s safe. It’s going to help you relax, and then sleep. It’s okay, it’s okay…” 

She remembered the first time she’d given a dose of this to Clint -- how many years ago? -- in Alma Ata. Yes, that was it. He’d freaked out, too, probably worse than Tony was right now. But soon he’d quieted into sleep – a rest he’d badly needed after three days of surveillance and stress. She remembered that long night while she kept the watch alone, moonlight over the mosques and minarets of the ancient city, waiting for Budenor to finally appear at his safehouse, hoping she didn’t have to wake Clint up with the strong dose of amphetamine that she also carried in her pharmacopeia. As it was, Budenor had taken another week to show up for his fate, so Clint had gotten his rest. As had she. 

_Oh, yes, they’d been well-rested for that kill._

She shook off that particular memory; best to keep that bloody business in the past. She was about to reveal something else locked deep inside her, and she didn’t know if she could. She didn’t know why she felt compelled to say it – something about Tony’s despair. Something Loki had picked at and worried at and tried to break her with; something she needed to grasp and verbalize and finally take back -- as her own. 

Tony’s breathing had slowed; he was still awake, but not resisting the drug any more. 

He leaned a bit more heavily against her. 

“I don’t know if I can tell you this whole thing,” she said to him. “But I’ll try. Tony – we all have red in our ledgers. Do this job long enough, and we all make mistakes. Sometimes bad ones. Sometimes…very bad ones.” 

He shifted, and she felt a torrent of trembling pass through him, and then he calmed and sighed, soporific already. “You don’t need to tell me anything you don’t want to…” 

“It’s okay.” She stroked his hand. “In 2003 I was in Sao Paolo. Very young, only my second assignment…” 

His eyes drifted closed, his breathing steadied and became deeper, more rhythmic as she talked. She gripped his hand and went on with the story anyway -- _the kids (so many kids) in the gymnasium, the missed communique, the bomb that she could have, should have, found…_

_And the destruction, the horror…the bodies of the children and the teachers, or what was left of them…the blazing building and the sirens and the wails and screams of the parents (so many screams) as they arrived and were kept behind the yellow tape…_

When she finished, she came back to herself slowly.

Tony was deeply asleep against her, a warm solidity, his breathing soft and regular. 

She realized her face was wet with tears, and that her tears had fallen on him and glistened in his dark, matted hair in the light of the streetlamps from the window. 

The room was dark now except for that silvery light. She held Tony and rocked back and forth a little and let the tears flow, fiercely, silently. She missed Clint ( _damn you, Clint_ ), and she missed Bruce ( _where the hell are you, Bruce?_ ), and she was angry, really angry, at Steve for being a _fucking idiot_ and dividing the Avengers…and she missed having a life of her own. 

If this was Tony’s pity party, she thought, well, now she was doing a pretty great job of making it hers, too. Her lips curved up on one side even as the tears kept coming. 

Had she ever had a life of her own, though? No, this was the closest thing, her life now with the Avengers. For the first time, she felt like she was doing something good in the world – not destroying things, not coldly taking assignments…and lives. These people, this team, had given her a purpose, and she would protect them with her life. 

“Come on, Tony – let’s get you a little more comfortable,” she whispered, dashing her sleeve against her eyes and easing him down onto the carpet. He was a dead weight in her arms. He still smelled like battle – smoke and grime and cordite and violence. She stood up, unhinging cramped muscles, and felt the wetness drying on her face, and somehow she felt a little better. 

She tried the light switches – no electricity. “Damn it, Stark – you’re a billionaire and you don’t pay your electric bills?” And then she realized that without Jarvis, without Pepper, yeah -- he probably hadn’t for a while. 

The apartment was cold and rapidly getting chillier. She found one of the bedrooms and pulled pillows and blankets off the bed, carrying them to the living room where Tony was sleeping. 

“OK, pal, let’s get you out of at least some of those reeking clothes,” she said. The thought crossed her mind that she’d undressed many men in her time, mostly as part of the job; sometimes for fun. She turned him slightly and found the zipper for the armor-undershirt, pulling it down expertly. He moaned a little as the tight shirt loosened, and she eased it off him. 

Holding the shirt in her hand, she stared down in the livid lamplight from the windows. The bruises on his upper body were so thick and close together that it looked like his head was floating above a blackened torso. 

“Jesus,” she murmured. “Tony.” Either the new armor didn’t do a very good job of protecting its wearer from bruising, or his fight with Bruce, even in the Hulkbuster armor, had been so savage it had still done this to him. “I think you need to invent better armor. Is this what you go through every time?” She hoped not; she really did. 

He winced and turned a bit as she reached out to try to lift his head onto one of the pillows. “Easy.” 

He quieted under her touch, and she drew a blanket over him – two blankets -- and looked at her watch. Just after 11 p.m. Steve would be wondering where Tony was, why he’d left Avengers Tower. He’d probably wonder where she was, too. 

Well, let him wonder. 

_God, men are such idiots._

She read men for a living. She understood Tony’s resentment of Steve, all that business with his dad and all the stupid jealousy that entailed -- but she knew that underneath all that, Tony was an insecure mess who desperately wanted Steve to love him, to at least respect him. And Steve did – but he didn’t, or he wouldn’t admit it, or if he did, it was rarely…and Tony took every slight from Steve very personally. 

And Steve, she knew, saw so much of Howard in Tony that it hurt him almost physically every time he looked at him; and Howard hadn’t been perfect, far from it -- but he’d loved Steve like a son, and Steve missed Howard, and to him Howard had only been gone for a little while…and Steve wanted Tony to… _what?_

_What does Steve want? What do either of them want?_ She shook her head. Who knew with these two? Both of them were leaders, but…Steve was the military genius, the rallying point, the general of men, loyal, steady and courageous. But Steve longed for a world of the past, a world that could easily be understood, where right and wrong were choices easily made. Tony was the visionary, the innovator, the futurist who saw things as they could be -- and invented them so they would be. He lived in a world where things were not so easy to understand, where ethics were much more difficult to figure out. He was just as brave and courageous – he was, after all, no muscled super-soldier, but a slight man who threw himself into battle with an unhealthy heart, whose armor was the only thing that (barely) protected him. But he lived in a world and a mind-set so fundamentally different from Steve’s…

 _These two._ The anger and the love and the pain went so deep, through wars and generations and missed opportunities and crossed connections. 

How would they ever resolve it? 

Natasha shook her head. She was exhausted, too, and she knew she’d probably never figure either one of them out. She desperately wanted a shower, but she didn’t even know if the water was on in this place, and if it was, it was probably ice-cold.  
She looked down at the sleeping Tony. She sighed, picked up a blanket and wrapped it around herself, and sat on the floor beside him. 

She’d take the watch while he slept. Maybe things would look clearer in the morning light, with some coffee – such a lovely, prosaic thing – and the city, saved once more, healing around them.


End file.
